>"I talked with SAP CEO Bill McDermott about that point a few months ago -- why SAP wants/needs to become a consumer brand. It has a lot to do with the younger, hipper, technically astute employee SAP wants to attract to the company. SAP's reputation is as a first-class developer of critical but "boring" B2B apps (my words, not his). SAP wants to be seen as playing in hotter verticals, including professional sports."

I'm so pleased you shared this. I read this article and as it so often the case with corporate sponsorhips I was wondering why on earth they thought this would be of any benefit to them. i couldn't imagine somebody seeing this and saying to themselves "Wow, I need to go buy SAP for my business." However, there's a lot more sense in terms of marketing the brand in order to make them more desirable to potential employees. Very interesting perspective, thank you.

IBM has been marketing to the "consumer" community for a long time. I think SAP is following in the footseps of IBM, which has been all over tennis, golf, and, until last year, football. They're after business leaders and wanna-be business leaders, not the beer-swilling types who paint themselves green and hold up signs and foam fingers.

I think pro sports leagues are going to have to do more of this kind of data sharing, and providing interactive and visualization tools that get people talking about the game. For one thing, fantasy leagues thrive on stats. You're going to need to back up your trash talking with data visualizations.

I'm hoping we'll see more and better visualizations starting January 29, but if you go to the link for NFL Fan Visualization http://global.sap.com/campaigns/superbowl-2014/index.html#section_1 and scroll down a tad to "get started," you'll see some of the interesting analyses. For example, state-by-state fan support seems to fall roughly along red-state for Broncos, blue-state for Seahawks lines, but move the slider to go back in time.

Another #fail, though: you have to "wait patiently" for "Real-time" results. Hope that's NetBase lag time and not an example of Hana "real-time" performance!

If sentiment for the Denver Broncos hit a season high when it came back against the Kansas City Chiefs in week 13, then sentiment for the Seattle Seahawks must have hit a season low after Richard Sherman's trash talk following the NFC Championship Game. I wonder if SAP tracked that negative sentiment and is making it public.

I talked with SAP CEO Bill McDermott about that point a few months ago -- why SAP wants/needs to become a consumer brand. It has a lot to do with the younger, hipper, technically astute employee SAP wants to attract to the company. SAP's reputation is as a first-class developer of critical but "boring" B2B apps (my words, not his). SAP wants to be seen as playing in hotter verticals, including professional sports.

Very interesting to say the least for SAP. The dashboards and analytics quite frankly resemble a similarity with IntelliCorp's LiveCompare software. I am very interested to see how this plays out. Can Sunday come any sooner?

Among 688 respondents, 46% have deployed mobile apps, with an additional 24% planning to in the next year. Soon all apps will look like mobile apps – and it's past time for those with no plans to get cracking.